It was most likely Venus that you saw in the west.temporal1 wrote:December 13, 2016: The Cold Moon
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/12/13266 ... -cold-moon
i wandered out a bit late to get mail, not 5:30, already mostly dark ..
was amazed to see a bright full moon, AND, across from it, "a star so bright," i had to stare.
on nights like these, i wonder how differently people must have viewed the world, esp before gas lights/electricity, esp living in tents, year-round. it would have been natural to always be watching the skies, to have the skies interwoven in all of daily life.
If you look up the sky at about a 10 or 11 o'clock angle from Venus (if that makes any sense), you will see a reddish star. That is the planet Mars.
A month or so ago, Saturn was also visible in the west right at first dark. The children and I enjoyed looking at it through the telescope.
I, too, have often thought about that, how we are so separated from the skies. The ancients seem to have had an obsession with sky gazing, judging by the number of ancient observatories and astronomically oriented buildings that have been discovered around the globe. I have read speculation that this may have been because some global cataclysm (Noah's flood?) might have been powerful enough to change the earth's axis and possibly even speed of rotation. So they were very serious about trying to figure out exactly what was going on in the heavens and what all had changed. Who knows, just something interesting to think about when staring up into space.
I have also read that the body's hormones are affected by our unnatural use of artificial light. Being isolated from the sky has thrown our bodies completely out of sync with the daily, monthly, and yearly light cycles that keep us, especially ladies, on an even hormonal rhythm. Our current house has master bedroom windows facing southeast and southwest, so we can enjoy the moonlight streaming in all night long. But we bask in fluorescent light long past God's lights-out time, so we're probably still out of sync.